How To Google Efficiently?

#productivity #google #beginners #search

Introduction 🪧

Everyone uses Google search at least once a day but most people may not be utilizing Google search to its full potential. If you want to learn how to use Google search more efficiently and get relevant and useful results as you want then you are at the right place. So here we start 🙂

Minimize Google search guesswork 🤔

Using quotes, one can minimize the guesswork of google search. For example: Suppose if you searched for "Flutter based projects" then google will also give the search results for individual words such as 'Flutter' but will not be doing this when you use the whole search text inside quotes and they will be considered as a single search and results will be given only for whole text searched and not for individual words.

Tell Google search what to exclude from the search result 😎

Hyphens are a great way to exclude alternate meanings of a word. For example, if you intend to find more information on the popular Python distribution, Anaconda, you would not prefer having Google telling you more about a snake.
Hence, to make your search more specific, you can use hyphens like this.
anaconda -snake

Can tell Google Search where to search a particular text 🧐

To search for something on a particular site, use the following format:-

<\text to search>:siteURL

For example, if you want to search Python functions on StackOverflow, you would enter the following in the search bar,

<\Python functions>:www.stackoverflow.com

Use asterisk wildcard ✳️

Use an asterisk to let google fill the spaces between text. For example, suppose if you forgot some Linux commands and remember just some part of it then you can fill the spaces you are not sure about with an asterisk and let google do its job.

STOP WORDS (AND, THE, WHERE, HOW, WHAT, OR) ❗

Using keywords would make a difference, but that doesn't include smaller words like "the", "and", "where", "how", "what", and "or". Google ignores these words because they basically just slow down your search. If you need to use a stop word in your search, you can override Google's rule by adding a "+" in front of the stop word with a space before it.

Some other common shortcuts ⏩

1. Related

The shortcut related can be used to search for a website related to a particular website.

Eg: related:djangoproject.com

2. OR

This shortcut can be used to search multiple words at once.

Eg: "The best way to learn competitive programming" OR "Competitive programming tutorials"

3. Define

This will display the definition of a word.

Eg: Define: hackathons

4. Time

This will display the time of whatever place you want.

Eg: Time Silicon Valley

Now the above tips were enough to know the basics hacks (there are many more though) of google searching now we can get into general tips,

Keep the things simple: 💡 Describing each and everything about what you are searching for is not recommended. Believe that Google is intelligent enough to guess things and try to search for minimum basic. Like instead of typing a whole question to search for, just the main phrase of the question can be searched.
Be intelligent in navigating the search results: 🎯 Sometimes we have to be intelligent enough from our side also to get a result that we wished to from the search results returned by google. This is the case mostly when you are using google search to debug an error you might have encountered. For example, suppose you wanted to debug a ubuntu installation error then instead of navigating to random sites first StackOverflow or ubuntu official support website should be looked into.

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